Secure and distributed video surveillance via portable devices

Abstract

In this work we present a system for distributed video surveillance based on the Client-Server model. The system we present can be accessed via portable devices. In many real-world scenarios is useful, or sometimes necessary, to have portable devices that can receive real-time data from a selected camera, to prevent or to manage anomalous activities. The system provides reliable, high speed, secure and real-time communication among all its components, which are the Repository, the Node and the Portable Device. Both Repository and Node can act as a server. The Repository can provide services to both Nodes and Portable Devices, while the Nodes provide services only to the Portable Device. The portable device can only act as a client, using the services offered by the other two parts. In our system, a portable device is assumed to know only the location of the Repository which permits to get the list of nodes connected with one or more camera(s). When a portable device gets the list, it can choose which node intends to connect to, to get the images of its connected camera(s). The security of the interaction among Node-Repository and Node-Portable Device is guaranteed by using the SSL/TLS protocol. The interaction among nodes and portable devices is secured by using an invisible digital watermarking algorithm on each image, before that image is sent from a node to a portable device. The latter extracts the watermark from the image and verifies the identity of the node.